A Toddler's Soufflés Aren't Just Child's Play

Augie, my 2-year-old grandson, is working on his soufflés. This began by accident. Grandmom was trying to simultaneously look after a toddler and make dessert. But his delight in soufflé-making was so palpable that it has become a regular event.

ENLARGE

Nicholas Frith

The bar, and the soufflé, rise higher on each visit—each time he does a bit more and I do a bit less. He graduated from pushing the Cuisinart button and weighing the chocolate, to actually cracking and separating the eggs. Last week, he gravely demonstrated how you fold in egg whites to his clueless grandfather. (There is some cultural inspiration from Augie's favorite Pixar hero, Remy the rodent chef in "Ratatouille," though this leads to rather disturbing discussions about rats in the kitchen.)

It's startling to see just how enthusiastically and easily a 2-year-old can learn such a complex skill. And it's striking how different this kind of learning is from the kind children usually do in school.

New studies in the journal Human Development by Barbara Rogoff at the University of California, Santa Cruz and colleagues suggest that this kind of learning may actually be more fundamental than academic learning, and it may also influence how helpful children are later on.

Dr. Rogoff looked at children in indigenous Mayan communities in Latin America. She found that even toddlers do something she calls "learning by observing and pitching in." Like Augie with the soufflés, these children master useful, difficult skills, from making tortillas to using a machete, by watching the grown-ups around them intently and imitating the simpler parts of the process. Grown-ups gradually encourage them to do more—the pitching-in part. The product of this collaborative learning is a genuine contribution to the family and community: a delicious meal instead of a standardized test score.

This kind of learning has some long-term consequences, Dr. Rogoff suggests. She and her colleagues also looked at children growing up in Mexico City who either came from an indigenous heritage, where this kind of observational learning is ubiquitous, or a more Europeanized tradition. When they were 8 the children from the indigenous traditions were much more helpful than the Europeanized children: They did more work around the house, more spontaneously, including caring for younger siblings. And children from an indigenous heritage had a fundamentally different attitude toward helping. They didn't need to be asked to help—instead they were proud of their ability to contribute.

The Europeanized children and parents were more likely to negotiate over helping. Parents tried all kinds of different contracts and bargains, and different regimes of rewards and punishments. Mostly, as readers will recognize with a sigh, these had little effect. For these children, household chores were something that a grown-up made you do, not something you spontaneously contributed to the family.

Dr. Rogoff argues that there is a connection between such early learning by pitching in and the motivation and ability of school-age children to help. In the indigenous-tradition families, the toddler's enthusiastic imitation eventually morphed into real help. In the more Europeanized families, the toddler's abilities were discounted rather than encouraged.

The same kind of discounting happens in my middle-class American world. After all, when I make the soufflé without Augie's help there's a much speedier result and a lot less chocolate fresco on the walls. And it's true enough that in our culture, in the long run, learning to make a good soufflé or to help around the house, or to take care of a baby, may be less important to your success as an adult than more academic abilities.

But by observing and pitching in, Augie may be learning something even more fundamental than how to turn eggs and chocolate into soufflé. He may be learning how to turn into a responsible grown-up himself.

The concept that people do not solve problems, learn and communicate the same way is not new. Genetically we are wired differently so some children don't have to do the same math problem 50 times to understand the concept. The problem comes in when the teachers union dictates that their is one and only one correct way to solve problems, learn and communicate. Teachers will break your child's will in their attempt to stuff him/her into one of their neat little boxes.

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